Hi again,
I would like to backup my drive with Vista in it, because I want to get rid of it and use my new thinkpad for openbsd only. But I still want to backup what came with it.
Since all my attempts using ThinkVintage failed, I'm thinking of copying the whole disk, or at least the three partitions that came with the laptop.
They are three HPFS/QNX/AUX partitions.
How can I backup everything so that if I wanted to I could copy back all of it into the disk and have it as "new"?
Is dd an option?
What's the best way to do this, and using less space space?
tks

Vista uses NTFS. OpenBSD's NTFS driver has been in "experimental" state for years -- it is limited to read/only access, and requires a custom kernel. Even with the driver configured, OpenBSD is not usable for backup/restore of NTFS data. Of course, dd(1) is an option, but it is a sector-by-sector copy of an entire partition, or, of an entire disk.

For NTFS backup, I prefer the ntfsclone utility, from the Linux-NTFS project. It will back up and restore an NTFS partition, copying only the saved data. This requires a different OS, of course. I have seen reference to ports of their toolset to FreeBSD, but I use a liveCD of Puppy Linux to run ntfsclone on Windows workstations, both WXP and Vista.

You would also want to back up the partition table; that can be done from OpenBSD's fdisk(8).

well... I was trying to dd the whole disk with dd if=/dev/sd0 ...
I booted the bsd install bsd.rd, and was thinking of doing it from there, but it does not have gzip. I think it would be better to gzip before sending, because this machine is faster, and I don't know how long it would take to send 250g even though the computers are in the same room...

It will only save the primary partition table. It will miss any extended partition tables, and it will miss any boot loaders stored in the first track. Personally, I prefer fdisk(8) for saving and restoring MBRs; I don't back up my multibooter -- which is GAG -- I reinstall it.

yes it was 10m, it took 5 hours for a 250g drive with a final .gz file of 43.8g.

jggimi: how do I backup the partition table with fdisk? Is it the -u option? But hasn't dd if=/dev/rsd0c saved the whole of it, including partition table etc? In that case I should not need any more backing up, right?

thanks a lot to both of you, it was all very helpful, and I finally start to understand a bit more about partition tables.
Now I might give FreeBSD a try, although, I'm quite used to OpenBSD and would like to stick to it. But the ram issue and some ports I'd like push me away.

To back up primary and any extended MBRs, just back up the first track:

# dd if=/dev/rsd0c of=mbr.backup count=63

I'm confused. Did you mean to say here that backing up the first track saves any boot loaders that may be stored there (which you said up-thread)? My understanding is that the extended boot records are spread out accross the whole disk, each right in front of the logical partition it defines. Thanks for any clarification!

You are correct, and I wrote misleading information, above. Extended partition tables are located within extended partitions, and would not be located within the first track. There may be one or more of these, chained recursively.

The first track on the drive contains the MBR and may also include programmatic information, such as a multiboot loader.